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disadvantaged youth most likely to credit the rich for their own success

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My friend Connie Flanagan reports on her study of 600 US adolescents:

It was adolescents in the least privileged circumstances (whose parents had lower levels of education, whose schools were located in low-income communities, and whose classmates reported few discussions of current events at home) who were more likely to admire the wealthy for making it and contend that people were poor because they lacked motivation or hadn’t applied themselves in school. In fact, the connection between working hard in school and succeeding in life was palpable [for poor kids, whereas privileged students were more likely to cite structural inequalities.]

This is a deeply important fact about the US, one that helps explain the weakness of economic populism. We just had an election in which the Democrats won the segment of voters with postgraduate degrees and the Republicans won the people whose educations stopped at high school–the working class. Connie proposes that more advantaged kids may have more “opportunities to learn about society,” for instance, in more demanding social studies classes or through media. She also thinks that

It may be easier to attend to the structural roots of inequality from a position of advantage since one’s own group is less likely to suffer the consequences of an unequal system. In other words, the freedom to criticize the system reflects, in part, the safety net of privilege.

In contrast, for those youth who remain in schools where half of their classmates will drop out, an ardent commitment to self-reliance and a belief in the efficacy of individual effort may keep them going. The imperative of self-reliance and the lack of safety nets also seem to be messages that they hear at home: it was youth in the least privileged families who were most likely to report that their parents admonished them that they should work twice as hard as others if they wanted to get a job; that people have to create their own opportunities since nobody hands them to you; that they couldn’t blame others for their problems; and that if they didn’t succeed in life, they would have only themselves to blame.

civic engagement and jobs

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The National Journal’s Fawn Johnson has an article today entitled “Civic Engagement Can Help Millennials Get Jobs: Community volunteering teaches the same soft skills that employers need.” Some of the underlying evidence is ours. For instance, we have found that rates of civic engagement predict rates of employment at the community level.  That may be because individuals get jobs through civic engagement or because engaged citizens address problems in their communities (such as underperforming schools or crime) that stand in the way of jobs. At the individual level, students who are civically engaged (even as a requirement) perform better in school, perhaps because civic engagement imparts skills and motivates them to study.

Johnson quotes two of my friends and colleagues, Generation Citizen’s Scott Warren and the American Democracy Project’s George Mehaffy, both of whom see their important projects as related to employment.

I believe we can tighten the connection between civic engagement and work if we take two steps:

  1. We should find ways of demonstrating that individuals have obtained job-relevant skills through their civic engagement. Imagine a student who has middling grades and no plans for college. But he is an excellent organizer who regularly persuades peers to resolve violent disputes and can get people to turn out for community events. Employers might like to hire this person, but they have no way of knowing his skills. We should award meaningful and rigorous badges or certificates for civic skills, to increase their market value.
  2. We should think of civic engagement more as work and less as service–the shift that Harry Boyte has been advocating for some time. Often, civic engagement is defined in strict contrast to paid work, so that if you receive a paycheck, you are not being “civic.” The classic civic acts are then voluntary service and voting, neither of which is paid. One consequence is that we don’t take these acts fully seriously. In particular, we thank people for volunteering whether they have done any good or not. But you can strengthen your community while on the job, and you can act as if you have a job even if you are unpaid–for instance, if you are accountable for results. If we treated unpaid service opportunities as forms of work, we would take them more seriously and also make them even better pathways to employment. (And, by the way, if we can find the cash to pay volunteers, so much the better.)

“the self is moral”

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Summarizing a body of empirical research, the Duke psychologist Nina Strohminger argues that what constitutes our identity is our moral character, not (for instance) the memories that we have stored so far. Asked what characteristics a soul would hypothetically carry into another body, subjects choose the soul’s moral character. Asked which psychological changes would make someone into a new person, subjects select moral changes above total amnesia or an inability to recognize moral features. Given a chance to improve their own moral character with an imaginary pill, people say they would decline because that would mean abandoning their selves.

According to Strohminger, “moral features” constitute “the most important type of information we can have about another person.” She continues:

So we’ve been thinking about the problem precisely backwards. It’s not that identity is centred around morality. It’s that morality necessitates the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison d’être. … What is it to know oneself? … When we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are.

I would like to connect this discussion to psychological research on how we perceive the identities of ordinary objects, such as apples and chairs. (This link may have been made already; I have not looked.) According to experiments by Sloman, Love, and Ahn, people perceive as integral or essential those features of an object that could not change without affecting many other features. Therefore, a network model is useful. Think, for instance, of the many features of an apple (its crunchy texture, sweet taste, origins on a tree, function of protecting seeds, color, size, role in Greek myths, etc). These features can be seen as nodes in a conceptual network. The nodes that we see as more definitive of appleness are the ones that have higher network centrality.

Likewise, I would model any person as holding many ideas in his or her head at any time. The individual ideas are all subject to change. Some are linked to others, forming a large, complex, and evolving conceptual network. Some of the nodes are moral ideas, however you define morality. When we think of another person’s identity, we should not cite just one or a few clear-cut principles or virtues. That would reduce the complex person to an abstraction. But we should have in mind a cluster of connected–although not always mutually consistent–nodes that are relatively central to that person’s whole network. These nodes cannot change without setting off a cascade of other changes that may be sufficient to alter the person’s whole character.

In short, as Strohminger writes, “the self is moral”–and I would add that the moral self is a network of ideas defined by the cluster(s) of relatively central nodes. That is what our souls would take with us into new bodies or a new life.

sometimes it’s better to listen

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Sometimes you should recognize that your own voice doesn’t have any special value and concentrate on listening and learning instead. (Perhaps the president should have thought that way before he made his brief and palid address last night.) I have been thinking about Ferguson today, but I would yield my time to others more eloquent and better placed to comment than I. For instance:

why do the disadvantaged not participate?

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In last week’s election, 51% of the voters said they were college graduates. Among adult Americans (by my calculation), 34% have associates’ degrees or higher and 29% have a bachelor’s or more. If a college degree is a mark of middle-class status, then the 2014 electorate was far more middle class–and less working class–than the population as a whole.

Many explanations can be given, and they are cumulative. Voting is harder for people who have less pertinent information ready at hand: for instance, those who do not already read political news. They may also face higher burdens in taking time off work or getting to the polls. Their confidence in their own opinions may be lower. They may see themselves and their concerns less reflected in politics. They hear fewer plausible messages about how the political system will address their needs. They are certainly less likely to be contacted and encouraged to participate–not only in the election of the moment, but in all forms of politics.

We can address these problems. Gaps are smaller in some other countries and used to be smaller in the US when turnout was higher here. In India, the lowest castes have higher turnout than the Brahmins.

But it is also striking how old and persistent are the patterns of unequal participation. In Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980), Jane Mansbridge found unequal levels of voice and influence in both a current Vermont town meeting and a radical commune, the two settings she studied. For comparison, she looked back at the earliest town meetings of colonial America. For instance, Dedham, MA (founded 1636) expected and required that everyone attend its meetings. The stakes were high, as the town set taxes and owned much common property of essential value to the residents. It was more like a commune than a modern municipality. But Mansbridge remarks (p. 131):

Even though no more than fifty-eight men were eligible to come to the Dedham town meeting and to make decisions for the town, even though the decisions to which they addressed themselves were vital to their existence, even though every inhabitant was required to live within one mile of the meeting place, even though each absence from the meeting brought a fine, and even though a town crier personally visited the house of each latecomer half an hour after the meeting had begun, only 74 percent of those eligible actually showed up at the typical town meeting between 1636 and 1644.

I don’t think we have evidence about how the participants differed from the nonparticipants in Dedham; but in nearby Sudbury, when a “crucial meeting” was held to decide whether common land would be apportioned equally or given in larger amounts to the wealthier landowners, the poor stayed home even though by attending they could have changed the outcome in their favor (p. 133).

Opportunities for political participation, such as votes, should be made convenient and actively encouraged. The recently enacted barriers, such as restrictive photo ID laws, may worsen inequality and also send a discouraging message. On the other hand, we have seen dramatic efforts to encourage participation, such as vote-by-mail, Motor Voter, and early voting. Those have done little good. And 17th century Dedham shows that even rules and processes highly favorable to participation are not sufficient.

Ultimately, there is no substitute for effective bottom-up political movements that drive agendas favorable to working people. The ideology of consensus and common interest in colonial Massachusetts may have discouraged participation by suggesting that there was no place for interest-based criticism and advocacy. If every good Christian agreed, then the town gentry might as well make all the decisions. In a somewhat parallel situation today, working class Americans lack a vital social movement that can make a real pitch for their votes.